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HP Buys Cloud Provider, Gets Marten Mickos To Head Its Cloud Division
jfruh writes: In 2010, HP tried to buy its way into the analytics game by shelling out billions for Autonomy, a deal that was a famous disaster. But that isn't stopping the company from making big buys: it will be buying Eucalyptus, a cloud provider headed by ex-MySQL AB CEO Marten Mickos, and bringing Mickos in to head the new HP Cloud division.
Maybe he can show HP how to do URLs instead of the gibberish ones they've been using for years.
Because I get the distinct impression that the URLs like "http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/psi/swdHome?sp4ts.oid=3988164&ac.admitted=1410546638124.876444892.492883150" are caused by HP not really knowing how to do it.
Seriously, what the heck is h20565.www2????
Either this is a technology failure, or HP has been trying very hard to ensure that nobody could possibly find their documentation.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
At least if he's working for HP he won't be able to do any real harm to anyone any longer.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Since HP is apparently paying every tech news site include Slashdot not to mention their recent court ruling, I'll just leave this here:
"Hewlett-Packard and three subsidiaries pleaded guilty Thursday to paying bribes to foreign officials in Russia, Mexico and Poland and agreed to pay $108 million in criminal and regulatory penalties. For over 10 years Hewlett-Packard kept 2 sets of books to track slush-funds they used to bribe government officials for favorable contracts."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
I can understand the interest in the existence of Eucalyptus itself (it's a more or less interface compatible implementation of a bunch of Amazon's heavily used 'cloud' services that you can run stuff on in house or at a non-Amazon 3rd party). Amazon's pricing is crazy aggressive; but sometimes you need to do things in house, want to do things in house, or want to go mixed-strategy(in-house/Amazon for overflow, spread across more than one 3rd party provider, etc, etc.) and in general it's not a good feeling to have a stack of important stuff dependent on a single vendor.
What I find much harder to understand is what HP gains from this, or what I, the hypothetical customer, as supposed to be willing to pay HP to put its name on here.
Is this just more HP flailing, or is there an angle I'm missing? Are there lots of potential customers who won't touch Amazon (perhaps because they have to keep stuff internal); but won't touch Eucalyptus without some giant company selling them a support agreement? If so, since Amazon is off the table, why would they care about Amazon API compatibility? Who is the target here, and why aren't they either DIYing it, paying Amazon's incredibly aggressive prices for the real thing, or using an architecturally different cloud/VM arrangement?
I guess Slashdot is really feeling the bite since they won't get rid of the Beta nonsense. I'm glad to see it.
The most famous interview this guy has done was with Guy Kawasaki in 2006, and in that he sounded like a complete and utter Republican dick sucker. He said nothing that was progressive. He said nothing about helping people. All he talked about were profits. He is a horrible person that doesn't care about people. Of course maybe since HP is Republican ruled that is what they want. They hate us and don't care if we die as long as they make their quarterly profits.
Amazon and Microsoft are already slashing cloud pricing to almost nothing. Why would HP want to pay good money to get into a business with margins approaching zero faster than a calculus limit?
http://youtu.be/9ntPxdWAWq8
HP is a drowning man, desperately grasping for any lead, imaginary or not, that might save them. The leadership bankrupted and hollowed out a solid line of printer products and other devices, in order to prop up stupid, non-distinctive hardware whose design was phoned in to imagine grabbing some market share with no other purpose. Their PCs, laptops, tablets are a joke. The major purchaser of their equipment are corporations who buy because they extract big discounts from a struggling company with little direction on where to make the important investments.
Buying a position in the cloud will be a small hiccup on the way to significant slashing of their portfolio, whether they do it voluntarily or because they're forced to soon. HP is too late to the cloud game, where others have already rolled out products and services that customers actually want. They would have to bring a rockstar team to make this a piece of their business that sets them apart, and invest enough to catch up and turn helpful levels of profit. Otherwise, they just bought a huge commodity business that lets them say that they're "getting into cloud in a big way", which will turn into a quiet side pursuit within 2 years...
I read you are here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and seeing you keep a TomHudson sockpuppet account http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson... and this other of your many sockpuppets on slashdot too http://slashdot.org/~Barbara%2... also makes me believe you may be. Are you?